Released in France on February 11, 2026, Wuthering Heights brings together Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi and Emerald Fennell around a landmark, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, published in 1847. Presented as a dark romance on a grand cinematic scale, this 2 h 16 version anchors itself in the fever of beginnings. However, it eliminates the rest. As a result, a storm of reproach arises. People judge less a film than a symptom. This symptom reflects a cinema that favors packaging over vertigo and turns the classic into a global object of desire.
The Cardboard Moors and the Plastic Heart
Imagine the Yorkshire moors, that skin of heather, wind and silence. Indeed, here it has become a studio set. At first you think you see mist, then you understand it’s a veil, laid down to suggest depth. You think you hear the wind, then it sounds like an overly polite sound effect. You find yourself searching, behind the set, for the slightest grain or roughness. Indeed, you look for something that scratches the image and reminds you that this story was born in the mud. It did not come from a display window.
The film often strikes the pose of savagery. It borrows the signs—untamed hair, rumpled costume, the embrace as threat—but avoids the texture. What Brontë summoned through structure and nested narratives, the direction replaces differently. Indeed, it uses immediate flashes and shots that seek the icon. You leave with the strange sensation of having seen many images and little time. It’s as if the tragedy had been compressed to fit into a stream.
In the novel, the landscape is not a background. It is a character, an atmospheric pressure, a raw nerve. In the film, it resembles a painted backdrop that trusted filters too much. Calibrated mist and watercolor digital skies create a particular atmosphere. Moreover, interiors gleam like department store windows. Everything is on display, everything saturates and demands to be seen.
This accumulation is not innocent. It reflects an era that confuses intensity with volume. When Brontë builds a world of social fractures, inherited resentments and intimate violence, Fennell seems to prefer pose to depth. Passion turns into a series of tableaux and an album of evocative images. Thus, you breathe less of the peat’s smell. But you perceive more the scent of spotlights.
The scandal is not merely about taste. It touches a deeper question: adaptation as an act of reading. Tackling Wuthering Heights is like entering a creaking house where every door opens onto another door, where narratives fit together like curses. The film chooses to wall up those corridors. It keeps only the first surge, the initial conflagration between Catherine and Heathcliff (Cathy and Heathcliff), then stops, as if the story were only a prelude to promotion.
Emerald Fennell: From Insolence To The Chic Industry
We knew Emerald Fennell as biting, unpredictable, capable of installing lasting awkwardness in an overly polite living room. With Promising Young Woman, she emerged as an edgy screenwriter, wielding irony like a blade and indignation as dramatic fuel. With Saltburn, she pushed further—toward stylized indecency, assumed grotesque, provocation as signature.
Wuthering Heights feels like a third movement, less free, more industrial. The director retains her taste for excess, but excess has changed owners. It is no longer an author’s weapon against conventions. It becomes the fuel of an event-making machine. It’s not the filmmaker imposing her vision, but the system offering a setting and a massive budget. Moreover, it offers a global campaign and expects in return a recognizable product.
In that logic, the reading of the novel adjusts. The film cuts, simplifies, erases. It removes structural characters, shrinks social stakes, softens the dimension of haunting and metaphysical fury. The house is no longer a place you return to as you return to a wound. It becomes a set where you photograph yourself in costume.
The bet is known, and sometimes fruitful. One can betray a classic and give it life, provided the betrayal is inhabited. Here, the betrayal resembles a strategy. You don’t get the feeling the film reads Brontë. You get the feeling it uses her, like a prestigious title slapped on a soda bottle.
What’s missing, ultimately, is the shadow that made Fennell strong when she allowed discomfort. Here, the staging seems to ask permission of its own props. The gothic becomes a style rather than a disturbance, a color rather than a threat. The storm doesn’t break; it’s announced, put in a display case, then carefully wiped.
Margot Robbie: Star-Producer In The Room Of Mirrors
Margot Robbie is no longer just an actress. She is a brand, a power, a decision-maker. Her role as producer adds a layer of reading to Wuthering Heights. Despite its gothic ambition, the film often seems constructed as a stage for its two headliners. Everything converges on them, everything lights them, frames them.
This is not a moral reproach. It’s a manufacturing observation. Hollywood cinema in recent years has learned to turn the star into a total center of gravity. She doesn’t just play a character, she is the character, she is the event, she is the selling point. In this adaptation, Catherine sometimes seems less a Brontëan heroine, devoured by contradictions, than a figure designed to survive in images—to circulate, to become a clip.
The gap is all the more noticeable because Brontë writes a brutal youth, not a presentable one. Catherine is a force that self-destructs. She is a storm that refuses compromise and ends up punishing herself. When the performance tips toward chic, the storm becomes an accessory.
Looming in the background is Margot Robbie’s recent career. After embodying a global pop myth, she steps here into a dark romance. It’s as if cinema sought to convert celebrity energy into novelistic gravity. The star passes through the film, but the film struggles to pass through Brontë.
You can sense the temptation: make Catherine a figure of today, a heroine expressed through gestures, silhouettes, flashes. But Brontë doesn’t write a posture. She writes a contradiction. And that’s where the star, paradoxically, finds herself trapped. It’s not for lack of acting, but because the film prefers emblem to ambivalence.
Jacob Elordi As Heathcliff: Sex Symbol In A Role Too Narrow
Jacob Elordi has the look of an era in which desire is narrated through calibrated shots and photogenic silences. He plays Heathcliff, one of the most difficult characters in English literature—an individual shaped by humiliation, exclusion, rage and obsession. Heathcliff is not a dark lover. He is an enigma, a violence, a presence that contaminates the narrative.
But the film, by focusing on a succession of passionate scenes, reduces his mystery. It flattens him, makes him readable, therefore consumable. French critics noted a performance deemed mechanical. Beyond the actor, it’s the function the film assigns him that raises questions. Elordi seems instrumentalized as a figure of desire more than developed as a tragic figure.
To that reduction adds controversy over casting Heathcliff. In the novel, Heathcliff is described with marked otherness, using 19th-century terms and categories that feed the racism and social contempt he faces. Every adaptation therefore confronts a contemporary question: how to represent that otherness without caricaturing or erasing it. By choosing a white actor, the film shifts the debate. Some see erasure; others recall that Brontë herself cultivates ambiguity and that adaptations have often varied. The film, however, doesn’t seem willing to inhabit this tension. It sidesteps it, as it sidesteps so many rough edges of the novel.
The cruelest thing for Heathcliff may be that. His otherness in Brontë is not decorative. Indeed, it’s the engine of humiliation that produces a monster. If you remove that fissure, all that remains is a dark hero, ready-to-wear romanticism. And you then understand why the story, instead of biting, often contentedly strokes the reader’s fancy.
Marketing As Screenplay, Criticism As Battlefield
The French launch of Wuthering Heights resembled a demonstration in discipline. Few images were offered beforehand, and access was controlled. Speech was framed, yet a massive presence imposed itself. Indeed, premieres, networks, official images colonize screens. The film, they say, resembles the extension of its campaign. It’s as if the narrative were only a pretext for the event.
This deployment rests on a big budget reported around $80 million. Moreover, it includes two faces capable of turning an adaptation into a global appointment. The calculation is simple: turn a rough work into an emotional destination where you buy an atmosphere as much as a story.
This impression fuels the violence of the reception. In France, several critics spoke of vandalism, of a film that hurts the novel and tires the eye. The attack targets both the overloaded form and the impoverished substance. Conversely, a minority defense emerged denouncing severity tinged with condescension. Sometimes sexist reflexes are pointed out, sometimes a generational rejection is observed. This rejection targets an assumed register—the contemporary dark romance.
This debate is revealing. It’s not only about whether the film is good or bad. It’s about what we expect from an adaptation and what we accept Hollywood doing to a canonical text. When a novel becomes a global product, it attracts different audiences and opposing expectations. Some seek literary vertigo, others an immediate emotional experience. The film chooses the most direct route and exposes itself to the anger of certain viewers. They hoped for shadow, silence and patient cruelty.
Brontë, The Erased Haunting And The Misunderstanding Of Dark Romance
Classifying Wuthering Heights as romance is not absurd, but it’s insufficient. The book tells of passion, yes, but a passion fed by injustice, money, education, humiliation. It is traversed by social cruelty and the question of property. It also addresses how a house can become a machine for reproducing wounds. Brontë does not compose a love story; she writes a contagion.
The film claims a reading as dark romance, a contemporary register where fascination flirts with danger. It explores a domain where desire is tried as an ordeal. On paper, the label could fit. In practice, it serves as a shortcut. It provides an immediately readable emotional manual and simplifies the novel’s complexity. Thus, it folds it into an aesthetic and a campaign.
By keeping only the first half, the adaptation deprives itself of what Brontë deploys later: the spread of evil, the transmission, the terrifying idea that one’s passion becomes another’s fate. Revenge, instead of becoming an architecture, remains an impulse. Haunting, above all, evaporates. In the novel, Catherine’s early ghost is not an effect. It’s a declaration. What was set in motion here will not close.
There is an almost comic misunderstanding. Dark romance promises vertigo. The film often offers the vertigo of a set, not that of a fate. Black is a filter. Violence, a posture. The mist—the sensation the novel leaves in the reader like a throat bite—disappears. Indeed, it dissolves at the first beam of spotlight.
A Classic On Screen, From Shadow To Mirror
If we measure the difficulty of Wuthering Heights on screen, it’s because the book has always resisted versions that are too self-assured. Cinema returns to it as one returns to an enigma. There have been adaptations choosing nobility, others the earth, others purity. Some, by smoothing the labyrinthine structure, produced fine melodramas. Others tried to render Heathcliff’s otherness, the brutality of classes, the almost animal quality of that stolen childhood.
Public memory sometimes keeps an older version where romanticism is confused with prestige. It also keeps rougher attempts that remind us that love in Brontë doesn’t reconcile; it fractures. Against that history, Wuthering Heights seems less a new reading than a conversion of the novel into a contemporary mirror—a mirror that doesn’t reflect the moors but the desire to make it a shareable image.
This shift may explain the anger. Spectators don’t only come to check fidelity. They come to find a sensation of discomfort—the feeling you have entering an inhabited house. Everything is inhabited, even silence. When the film offers a smoother, more decorative experience, the gap becomes an offense.
Charli XCX’s Music, Lifeline Or Escape
One element reaches consensus, even among the harshest detractors: the soundtrack by Charli XCX. The choice is savvy. It grounds the film in pop modernity. It creates a bridge between the 19th century and the streaming era. Moreover, it extends the experience beyond theaters.
But this musical success also says something troubling. You can appreciate the music without the film. That means the film failed to integrate itself into its narrative. Charli XCX’s soundtrack, one of the few points of agreement, becomes an escape route, a way to keep the best and leave the rest.
In a world where films branch into playlists, looks, clips, campaigns, music is no longer only commentary—it’s a parallel product. Charli XCX, delivering a standalone album, plays the century’s game: the fragmented work, consumable in pieces. And you wonder, for a moment, if Wuthering Heights was conceived for that—to survive outside itself.
A Globalized Classic, A Tamed Tragedy
At bottom, the failure of Wuthering Heights is not only a film’s failure. It tells of a larger metamorphosis: what happens to classics when they enter the global machine. We simplify them to export. We stylize them to be recognizable. We cast them to sell. We remove what clings, what embarrasses, what remains unexplained, in favor of an intensity easier to package.
Brontë’s novel resists ease. It does not flatter; it bites. It does not offer heroes; it offers beings that ruin themselves. It does not promise a love story; it shows an obsession that contaminates a whole world. From this perspective, Fennell’s adaptation resembles a display placed before a haunted house. It shines and attracts, bringing people in. Then it leaves visitors on the threshold—where the book used to pull you by the collar.
And yet, in this very misstep, something is revealed. Hollywood is not interested in Brontë out of love for heritage. In reality, Brontë is an ideal brand for posters. The classic becomes a quality label and a literary varnish. Thus, it gives romanced consumption the illusion of culture. One title, one couple, one slogan is enough, and the rest can be planed down.
This film may still have a virtue. By contrast, it reminds us that great works cannot be reduced to their summaries. They require time, silence, a kind of courage. And if Wuthering Heights fails to render the moors habitable, it can at least make you want to go back—by the pages, by memory, by that sentence the cinema too often forgets, the simplest and harshest: intensity cannot be bought.